By Peggy Sturdivant

Call it research. I’ve been meeting with other writers every week at the Ballard Coffee Works in their community room, and of course drinking a lot of their coffee. Four months ago I contacted the owner Sebastian Simsch letting him know that I wanted to write about his support of the community through their free meeting room.

“Thanks for your kind note and greetings from Rwanda,” he replied by email. “Scott Jensen is the Assistant Manager at Ballard Coffee Works, and I am sure he'd be able to talk with you all things community at BCW. He knows pretty much everyone who walks through the door.”

Weeks and other columns came and went while I’ve continued making observations while using the meeting room that’s within the business at the corner 22nd NW & Market, one of two Coffee Works locations. The room has glass doors on two sides and a window onto the high table where tastings or “cuppings” take place at least every other week on the afternoons I’m usually there.

Depending on which seat at the long wooden table you’re in you can witness great variety: pedestrians on both sides of 22nd, buses, cars, bicyclists, dogs, the crosswalks at Market, the line of customers inside Ballard Coffee Works, the cupping and spitting at the high table, hordes of mothers holding infants after the baby storytime at the library.

Every week from summer through fall has brought a different scenario, the window replacement, the outside area being built, inside painting and frequent reboots of the Internet which involves a ladder, a trapdoor in the ceiling of the meeting room and bare ankles as the owner himself feels for the top of the ladder on their way down.

All that’s required to use the room is to sign up in person; a calendar with one or two months at a time hangs on one wall. The sign-ups reflect the inner workings of Ballard as well as its passions…Sustainable Ballard, Salish Sea Trading, Power to Parent, Ballard Food Bank, a knitting group, book clubs, multiple writing groups, and people conducting interviews. There is so much to observe inside and out, it’s like watching multiple channels at once, all of them live.

The staff has come to recognize us and we recognize them. They ask after our vacations, our opinions on the sandwiches. When we spill our drinks they even help us clean up ourselves. It’s a venue that is particularly accessible to one of our writing circle in her motorized wheelchair.

Months after our first email exchange owner Sebastian Simsch was in town long enough to sit down me and a friend, on the side of the café with the shelves of children’s books and toys. “In every neighborhood there is one corner that’s the best,” he said, “and this one is it. You can’t take the best corner, the center of the community without the responsibility.”

Simsch thinks of the meeting room as a public tennis court, “A room for the community, by the community.” He’s considered having it available in hourly increments with the possibility of using it for a second hour if no one else comes along. “We knew there would be a demand,” he said. “Most people are extremely grateful for it. The team fully supports it.”

“We’re a very small business,” he said. “What gets us out of bed is the coffee, not the caffeine in it. Our mission is helping people to learn about the world through coffee.” There are photographs throughout the space of some of the people that he knows, and that he wants the customers to feel they know…Direct Trade farm partners in Brazil, Guatemala, in Sumatra, and Ethiopia.

I know that when I’m at Ballard Coffee Works and able to sit and write with my friends I feel at the center of Ballard, amazed that many a small business owner in Ballard is also a citizen of the world. Meanwhile the while the local team posts a word of the day, a quote of the day, points you to the toaster on the counter with your bagel. The wider a business opens its doors to the community the more connected we become, through yarn, photographs and words. Thank you Ballard Coffee Works for the windows on the world; please send our regards to Rwanda.

Ballard Coffee Works, 2060 NW Market St, Ballard, WA 98107
206.340.8867, service@seattlecoffeeworks.com